COMMUNITY COMMENT: Get away from the cliff and take a good look at reality

While we watch our leaders tackle deficit spending and the fiscal cliff, there are a few things on which we need to do a reality check.

First, the Bush tax cuts were intended to be temporary. When they were passed in 2001 and 2003, the stated intention was to return to the original tax rate for all Americans. I don't know what your understanding of the word "temporary" is, but most people would assume less than 10 years.

Second, the tax cut lowered the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. Now remember, top rate means only the top portion of your income is taxed at that rate, not all of it. If taxes go up for people whose income is greater than $250,000, only the portion over $250,000 is subjected to increased taxation. So if the top tax rate goes up by 4 percent, then someone making $300,000 will see their taxes increase by $2,000 a year, or, in other words, they will pay another 0.7 percent of their income in taxes (I'm rounding up). I fail to see how this can be considered a huge burden.

Third, one topic that has been brought up very little is the payroll tax cut. This is widely anticipated to expire at the beginning of the year, and essentially will be a 2 percent tax increase on all income below $113,700. Unlike an income tax increase, there are no deductions for this tax, so poor and middle income citizens will take the full 2 percent hit on their income.

Fourth, I find the argument of cutting Social Security to help balance the budget to be misleading at best. Social Security has run surpluses for years and loaned this money to the U.S. government. Just recently, it has started running a deficit and need to draw on its "savings."

If all your life you put your money in a bank to save for retirement, then when you went to collect it and the bank told you they spent it and you couldn't have all of it, someone would be going to prison. Social Security should be allowed to withdraw all the money it lent the government.

Social Security should be run on its own dime, and if benefits have to be cut to keep its books balanced, then that is a different story. But we haven't got there yet.

Finally, there has been no discussion of the massive government wasteful spending that could be trimmed to reduce the deficit (by the way, remember how we used to talk about balancing the budget but now we only say we are going to reduce the deficit?) I'm not talking about eliminating functions or services, but delivering them more efficiently (think Indiana BMV).

I was talking to a close relative a few weeks ago who works in Washington for a federal agency. He was ecstatic about starting a new job in a different department because in his old job he could complete all of his weekly work in about two hours, and the boredom was killing him.

Overall, he felt his department has at least twice as many people as needed. How many times is this scenario repeated throughout our government? How many redundant departments and agencies do we have (do we really need 16 intelligence agencies and a $50 billion a year Homeland Security agency)?

Congress should start discussing gradually letting all the tax cuts expire, including the payroll tax, and going back to the bad old 1990s, which ended with a balanced budget and economic prosperity.

They should find ways to streamline government. Finally, we should be reducing unneeded defense spending, including getting our wealthy allies to spend the same portion of their GDP on their defense as we do.

Surely there is some trimming that could be done everybody — Democrats and Republicans alike — can agree on that, while not balancing the budget completely, sure would help. Then we could start tackling the hard issues.